Divestment

I keep stumbling over these articles about modern-day cults of virginity. I posted about this one a while back. And this one was in last weekend's NYT Magazine. I find them fascinating. The prizing of virginity is a concept so foreign to me that I read these articles and the stories of the kids who maintain that there is value in abstinence with a great deal of wonderment. It's not that I deride them and think they're wrong; I know my brand of sex-positivism isn't for everyone. But I just plain don't understand why some people would ever choose to deny themselves a rather significant portion of the human experience. And so, I seek out these articles and read them attentively-- trying to understand, trying not to judge.

However, I once heard Hal Sparks (who I heart despite the uber-corny rock-throb photos on his homepage) say something to the effect that sex is good for us and we only get better at it with practice-- lots and lots of practice. And I must have actively nodded my assent at the TV. I *might* have paused to consider what practicing WITH Hal Sparks might be like. But I'm digressing. Regardless, his is a perspective I have in mind as I approach this topic.

I come to this subject, also, with only my own frame of reference with regard to loss of virginity. When I was about 15, I remember having a conversation with my dad. We were sitting in the car, in the garage. He said something like, in a day and age when there is a minimal stigma against practitioners of premarital sex, one really has no business NOT exploring this arena of experience. The stereotypical overprotective father, my dad is not. And yes, men really capable of saying such things to their 15-year-old daughters. God, I am so freakin' lucky to have open and rational parents who never did make arbitrary rules (with the possible exception of the wholly arbitrary body-piercing prohibition, which I promptly bucked when I came of legal age). I could NEVER have weathered an adolescence with more conservative parents-- I really don't think I could have! But anyway, I listened and understood what he meant, but it wasn't like, having been granted some sort of permission to experience my own sexuality, I nailed the next guy who cut his eyes in my direction. I was a zitty, four-eyed, underweight, frizzy-haired, brace-faced weirdo with a wad of Kleenex perpetually stuck to my face so as to staunch my chronic nosebleeds. Trust me, running out and having sex far and nigh was not an option for 15-year-old me. I was a far cry from the high-heeled, smart-assed, yoga-bellied...uh... weirdo that I am now.

Nevertheless, my libido kicked in well before my body caught up to it and by the time I was of legal age, I felt my virginity to be burdensome. I could have climbed the walls, so sticky and taut was I, with all my pent-up, breathless desires. I waited (due, mostly, to lack of opportunity) for another 3 years after that conversation with my dad. By that point, my academic interest in all things sexual had burgeoned into something akin to my current obsession. And I felt encumbered by my inexperience. Virginity was a mucky sinkhole out of which I was clamoring-- in a manner that can only be described as Sisyphean. I needed to know what sex felt like in order to properly conceptualize it. For some things, the imagination-- even an imagination that runs on a turbo-drive hamster wheel-- is simply inadequate.

So. There was a guy. He was 23 and I was 18. I'd had a crush on him for about a year... and he knew it but he told me he hadn't wanted to do anything about it because I was all jailbait-y and whatnot. I thought that was hysterical because... what was I going to do? Rat 'im out for ravaging me? For alleviating my handicap? Yeah, no. But there was a party one night. I followed him home to his apartment. He asked if I was a virgin and, though the lie tempted me, I told him the truth. It gave him enough pause to put me off until the morning. I slept beside him, naked and restless. My staying the night, I suppose, was some tacit insistence that the deed WOULD be done, maidenhood be damned, and besmirchment be heartily received! In the morning, he woke me, he rolled me over and into him. He entered me. It hurt-- it did-- and I felt a little invaded. He came on my stomach. But there was none of the blood about which I'd been warned. Nor was there any emotional transcendence-- or fallout, for that matter. I've since compared the experience to oral surgery-- I felt stretched out and used, but only temporarily. In the intervening years, I've come to relish that used feeling-- that sensation that comes after your body has been taken over by some Other-- that point at which you return to yourself after having lent yourself out, allowed someone to take you over, however briefly. But that first time I allowed it, I was calm and detached and curious. It was not an act into which I'd entered out of desire, unless you count desire for expansion of knowledge. And I'd spent most of it up in my brain, trying to decide if I was "feeling" anything. Mostly, I was feeling relieved. No longer could I be limited by that particular ignorance.

I've seen that guy a grand total of three times since. The first was about 4 days later, right before I moved away for college, to say goodbye. The second was a couple of years later at a Shakespeare in the Park performance-- he didn't remember my last name (and my last name's pretty easy to remember). I thought that was hysterically funny-- and I loved that, for both of us, the experience hadn't acquired any feathery pink patina of sentimentality. And the third time was about two years ago. I saw him across the lobby of The Belcourt, outside a screening of Blue Velvet. We made eye contact... and I'm sure I looked familiar but I don't think he could place me. I brushed past him and I don't think it registered. He'd grown his hair out long. He was wearing a white shirt. We were strangers.

So, that's MY divestment story.

We've all got little narratives that are more or less analogous, don't we? Sure, they're all a little different. But momentous, joyous, miserable, ambivalent or otherwise, they shape our existences and color our perspectives about sex in general. So, plain and simple, I just do not understand people who choose to delay-- or altogether forgo-- the experience. The NYT Magazine article interests me because it posits religion as mere subtext for motivating young people into celibacy. The people interviewed for this article might have initially arrived at their decision for religious reasons, but these college groups seem hell-bent on finding secular justifications for standing by their decisions. They turn to philosophers and feminist scholars and psychologists and evolutionary biologists. As do we all when we are hungry to declare our choices valid, I guess. But the attempts toward legitimizing celibacy in a secular age through academic rigor intrigue me to no end.

Some of it, I flat-out do not buy. Towards the end of the article, this Janie Fredell person begins to talk about the woes of inopportunely released oxytocin. Oxytocin is, of course, the hormone released during sex, among other pleasurable activities. Here's the paragraph about that:

“'Finding true love for me is the point of life,' she said, and she went on to explain that sex would only complicate the pursuit. She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone’s 'powerful bonding' effect can be 'a cause of joy and marital harmony' but that outside of marriage it can create 'serious problems.' Released arbitrarily, it can blur 'the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,' the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, and 'you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.'"

And then a few paragraphs later:

"The Web site warned what happens then to the sexually active; that oxytocin, in such cases, can cause 'a palpable sense of loss, betrayed trust and unwelcome memories. This is information that you will rarely hear from sexual-health groups,' because, the Web site says, 'there is no condom for the heart.'"

Now, seriously. I've experienced both love without sex and sex without love. I've sloughed off the latter without any " palpable sense of loss" whatsoever. Experiences of the former variety, however, have been tinted with regrets and miseries that were most certainly palpable. I know I argue all the time that sex and emotionality are just so many synaptic firings and chemical reactions within our bodies, and I'm certainly familiar with the role oxytocin plays in the pair-bonding process. But the idea that an arbitrary release of oxytocin can make interpersonal relationships more painful and break-ups feel lousier is pretty nutty. Sexless relationships can break your heart as easily as sexual ones can -- and a denial of that fact is one only a person who's never had a sexual relationship can make. No, OK, maybe that's not fair. But it is a denial that only a person who's kept themselves invulnerable from (to? what's the right preposition here?) actually falling in love could make. It's hard for me not to wonder a little bit if some of these kids are just a little crippled by their anxieties about opening up their bodies to another human. Of course, that's idle speculation and is also probably quite unfair, when these kids certainly seem self-aware and capable of analyzing their own motivations for being celibate. But that "there is no condom for the heart" line, as used in this context, is so ironic I just don't know how they can take it seriously. I mean, yes, it's true! There IS no condom for the heart. But hearts are also subject to whims not remotely related to the genitalia. And hence, they tend to open their little ventricular legs whether or not they've conferred with said genitalia. So, because hearts can bump up against each other with or without the involvement of other body parts, that argument's totally moot.

I do, however, like Fredell's argument that the choice for abstinence is actually pro-feminist. Yes, I'm scared that any line of thinking that might restrict a woman's choice to be sexual could be incredibly retrogressive, especially if one such line of thinking ever becomes institutionalized in any way. But the key word here is "choice." I've made a decision-- and several subsequent ones along the way-- that I want sex to be a part of my life. I feel empowered by those decisions. If Janie Fredell feels empowered by her decision to not be sexual, well, more power to her! She owns her body in a way that I think is analogous to the way I own mine. And while my path and hers are divergent, I still believe that they are both, essentially, inroads toward authentic feminism.

That said, the relentless drumbeat behind the argument for female assumption of control via celibacy is still the one that insists men are always pressuring women into sex. That it's always men doing the initiating and that, in order to receive love, women feel obligated to capitulate. And that misguided notion is one I'm sure I've railed against elsewhere on my blog. Not all men are predators-- very few, in fact, are. And not all women are love-staved, needy victims. This antiquated division of gendered behaviors bears so little relation to real-life sexually intimate relationships that I'm not sure why people continue to perpetuate it. I've said that before, too.

Now, I personally have never once-- not once!-- yielded to pressure for sex when I wasn't inclined in that direction in the first place. As I said, my decisions about how I choose to express my sexuality have allowed me to claim ownership over my body, such that that sense of ownership is never questioned. For one thing, I have spot-on asshole radar. I'm sometimes attracted to difficult and troubled people, but I can spot a real user/manipulator from miles away-- and those people hold very little sexual draw for me. As a result, every time in my adult life that a person has attempted to initiate sexual activity with me and I have not reciprocated the desire, that person has politely backed off on my cue. I may have had a couple learning experiences when I was a kid, but I quickly picked up all the forcefulness one needs when one needs to effectively communicate a "no." Or even a "no chance in hell, dude!"

I realize that I wield a pretty great deal of power in the early negotiations of a sexual encounter. Actually, I resent the hell out of the fact that women so often bear most of the responsibilities for being sexual gatekeepers. You, sir, can look at the gate but not touch it-- for propriety's sake. You, sir, can touch the gate but not look at it-- also for propriety's sake. And you, my lucky friend, you can enter the gate and stay a while, but eventually I'll kick you out, too-- lest anyone think my hinges too risque! It's a shit job, folks. Especially when your gate has a ravenous appetite. So part of the joy of sex is abdicating that responsibility-- saying, take over! YOU rule the gate for a little while. It's a tremendous release. But one can only enjoy the luxury of such an abdication when one has total and utter confidence that her yay or nay will be respected and accepted at face value. And that confidence is something one can only achieve when one is minimally needy or love-starved (hey, we all feel a little needy and love-starved at least some of the time, right?). I mean, if you don't doubt your own convictions, neither do other people-- even in the most intimate of scenarios. Say yes. Or say no. But either way, you've got to mean it when you say it. I don't think this is the secret to date-rape prevention, by the way, but it might give us a leg up. Just a theory.

Ultimately, I don't really know how to feel about these organized eschewers of sex. I appreciate their rights of free choice, so long as they don't attempt to impose their choices on me, of course. I worry that these types of ideas tend to infect public policy, though. I haven't even touched on all the havoc Bush's ostrich-headed abstinence-only education programs have exacted upon the sexual health of America's school children, but I think it's clear that I worry, too, on a more individual and personal level, whether self-denial is really all that viable an avenue for most of us-- even for these kids who profess to believe in it. Look at the Leo Keliher kid from the article! He tortures himself with this stuff. Is that really all that healthy for his soul? But I'm constantly reminding myself: it would piss the hell of me for them to judge me; what business is it of mine to judge them? That's right: none.

I should note that this post is taking a step in self-revelation that I've been reticent to make up to this point. Sure, I allude to my sex life now and again, but I've never once relayed much of a narrative from it. Until now, that is. I think I've been building up to it for some time, though-- like in my "a little faith in me" post. But I'm being inspired and influenced by the writers of sex blogs and the like, I think. I admire their writing and I admire the authority they claim when they speak about their experiences. These readings of mine may well change the mission of this blog for a little while. Here's where I currently stand on my own sexual self-exposition in a public forum: if I'm going to discuss the way my culture-- the one in which I participate-- perceives sexuality, I can only do it through my lens of selfhood. And I owe it to the ideas to be honest about that. I'm still going to talk about movies and feminism. But it's always my own story. I don't have any other tools.

So, please forgive me for invoking your spirit without permission, dear boy to whom I gratefully relinquished my virginity. I do it with neither ill intent nor your name... as you are, no doubt, quite So, please forgive me for invoking your spirit without permission, dear boy to whom I gratefully relinquished my virginity. I do it with neither ill intent nor your name... as you are, no doubt, quite Google-able.